Ginny Gall

Starred review from February 15, 2016
Smith's brutal, beautifully written novel chronicles how racism in the segregated American South repeatedly derails the future of Delvin Walker, an aspiring writer. Delvin is haunted throughout his life by the memory of his mother, who fled Chattanooga, Tenn., upon being accused of killing a white man. Following her disappearance, Delvin and his siblings are separated and placed in foster care. Delvin's love for reading and storytelling is nurtured when he's taken in at age six by kindly Cornelius Oliver, a well-to-do mortician who hopes to pass his business on to Delvin. The particularly horrific mutilation and murder of a young black man leaves its mark on everyone, and Delvin later leaves Chattanooga, worried about an incident involving guns and some hostile white boys. He begins traveling on the rails and meets a man who calls himself Professor Carmel. Delvin agrees to help him run his mobile museum, which showcases photos of murdered black men. He's working with Carmel when he runs into a northerner named Celia, the first woman for which he pines. All along, Delvin keeps a notebook of his writings and longs to write a proper book. Smith (Men in Miami Hotels) is a master at conjuring evocative images, and his expert wordsmithing makes the brutal third actâin which Delvin is falsely accused and imprisonedâparticularly visceral. This unforgettable story hits all the right notes, by turns poignant and devastating.

September 1, 2015

A syndicated columnist who appears twice weekly in the Washington Post and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner for Why Americans Hate Politics, also a National Book Award finalist, Dionne offers a distinctive take on today's extreme conservatism. He argues that it's not the result of Tea Party activities but that the Tea Party can trace its impetus back to Barry Goldwater, whose drive for ideological purity shut out alternate views and pushed moderates out of the Republican Party.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2015
A violent and sorrowful Jim Crow South brims in this brutal novel. For his 17th book, poet and novelist Smith creates a harrowing, luminous Jim Crow story that takes its title from "a negro name, Ginny Gall, for the hell beyond hell, hell's hell." The terrain is so frequently hellish--lynchings, firebombings, beatings, rapes--that one wonders how Smith stomached the work. His writing, in its lyricism, makes a queasy juxtaposition between horror and beauty. The story hinges on a reimagining of the Scottsboro Boys trials, in which nine African-American youth were railroaded on false rape charges. This novel begins "on the hot July day in 1913 exactly fifty years after the final day of the Battle of Gettysburg, a day uncelebrated in Chattanooga." A prostitute named Cappie Florence gives birth to her fourth child, Delvin Walker, who becomes the Bigger Thomas-like protagonist here. The birth is perilous, the child--who reads at an astonishingly early age--is pronounced "wonderanemous," and the reader is gulled into thinking the story might be picaresque. Instead, Cappie flees police before Page 20 when Delvin isn't yet 5. He and his siblings are dumped into a foundling home, but the resourceful child finds himself, some two years later, apprenticed to a prosperous African-American funeral home director. Smith divides his novel into four books, and to start Book 2, he conjures a racial misunderstanding that puts teenage Delvin on the road at the cusp of the Great Depression. The adolescent traveler, like this novel, is ruminative, and for long stretches, his story is more pastoral than propulsive. Smith writes lushly, with a painterly eye. He depicts a mesmerizing, theologically rich funeral for a lynched man; Delvin's yearning for a college girl with whom he has one afternoon of rapturous conversation is achingly, gorgeously executed. Everywhere racism chars these pages. By Book 3, armed white men have forced Delvin and his doomed cohort off a Memphis-bound train. The writing can be a touch ripe: here is a man without consequence shutting a door in the street: "The sound was like a last clap of a civilization closing up." Still, for the resilient reader, a spell is cast. A riveting protagonist moves through unbearable racial carnage into a kind of legend.

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Starred review from February 1, 2016
Some life scars are formed early. When young Delvin Walker is just five, his prostitute mother abandons him to escape from the law. Surviving through his wits and charm, Delvin is initially taken in by a local funeral-home owner in Chattanooga, Tennessee, but the boy soon takes to traveling the rails in search of his destiny. The infamous Scottsboro Boys trial forms the beating heart of this languorous story, but veteran writer and poet Smith (Men in Miami Hotels, 2013) takes the reader on many a detour before he gets there. Delvin's life experiences add up over the course of this enormous boxcar of a novel as it wends its way through large swaths of the Deep South. What emerges are Jim Crow horrors: lynching, beatings, and, as the Great Depression approaches, the pervasive racism that is the lot of an entire people still grubbing in the dirt for Ol Massa. If at times the novel feels as saturated by its storytelling burden as a humid summer evening, it is nevertheless a stark and revealing portrait of our collective past, and the overarching theme of justice denied remains disturbingly relevant today.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)